In the embryo period, the umbilicus region is the only channel for an embryo to connect with its maternal body and get blood, oxygen and nutrition. Though after the fetus is given birth and the channel is cut off, the umbilicus region still has very close ties with the baby's organs. The umbilicus region is the thinnest part of the abdominal wall and has no subcutaneous fat. However, it has abundant blood vessels. Through scientific research, people have found that there are about 1400 kinds of bacteria parasitizing in human being's navels, more than 600 kinds of which are unknown. In our daily life, we seldom care about our navels, nor do we clean them frequently, which give very good opportunities for bacteria to live and proliferate. Different people have different types of navels, which can be classified into convex navels and concave navels. Especially, for a deeply concave navel, it is more prone to accumulate fouling inside, and it is very easy to get hurt and become infected when being cleaned off fouling.
These years, as people are paying more and more attention to human body aesthetics, they are more likely to choose the umbilical hole laparoscopic surgery as the abdominal surgery, which raises higher requirements for cleaning the umbilical hole.
At present, before surgery the umbilical hole is cleaned by manually dipping a dry cotton swab in turpentine, mainly rubbing the wrinkles on the wall of the umbilical hole and its bottom part, and repeatedly cleaning these parts using different cotton swabs until fouling cannot be observed. Due to the special anatomic structure of an umbilical hole, it is relatively difficult to be cleaned. The traditional way of cleaning using cotton swabs along with turpentine and alcohol may significantly irritate the skin of a patient. As a result, oftentimes red swelling of the skin can be observed. Also, it is not easy to use the thick head part of a cotton swab to clean the bottom part of a lacuna, and detachment of cotton flocks from the head part of the cotton swab may produce new foreign substances easily. Moreover, the traditional way of excavating longitudinally to clean the umbilical hole may have the potential risk of hurting the soft and tender skin at the bottom of the umbilical hole.
Further, in some other surgeries, it is also necessary to clean the patients' orifices. For example, for removal of earwax and foreign substances from ear, the traditional way of rinsing and excavating still poses certain risk to the interior structure of an ear. And some craniocerebral surgeries involving nasal cavity need to open surgical routes through the nasal cavity. However, current method of cleaning a nostril still has drawbacks, such as cleaning is incomplete and it may irritate the patient significantly. For surgeries involving the perineal region, such as abdominoperineal resection or repair of rectovaginal fistula, it is necessary to clean the perineal region. However, the anatomic structure of the perineal region, featuring plentiful wrinkles, as well as fecalith obstruction in the patient, may be the causes of incomplete cleaning of this region. And this also makes it very difficult to do surgical disinfection. With the advancement of surgical technologies, to reduce a patient's trauma and maintain the wholeness of the patient's skin as much as possible, surgeons use natural orifices of human bodies as surgical routes more and more frequently, so as to avoid large scale skin trauma. This kind of surgery is referred to as natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES). However, as natural orifices of a human body are not like those exposed human organs, it is not easy to clean and disinfect these natural orifices. For these natural orifices, traditional ways of cleaning, such as rinsing, using cotton swabs and gauzes, also bring the similar problems such as incomplete cleaning and irritating the skin, etc., which occur in cleaning the umbilical hole.